Virtualization firm Parallels Inc. is hoping to break into the world of containers with its automation, security and management software.

Parallels told The Register that its automation and management software Virtuozzo could be useful in making containers better behave.

The company finds itself in something of a unique position with containers, because it actually claims Virtuozzo itself offers containers. But Virtuozzo’s containers don’t behave in exactly the same way, and in truth it’s much closer to traditional virtualization. That’s because it puts an entire operating system inside a container rather than just an individual app.

The idea of containers is extremely hot right now, what with companies like Google, Microsoft and VMware all buddying up to Docker Inc. But as hot as it is, containers aren’t completely reliable, as Cisco and Red Hat pointed out most recently.

Which is why Parallels is hoping to step in and make containers play nicely in enterprise environments. The company’s senior director for global product marketing Elliot Curtis told The Register that it isn’t ready to reveal what it has in store just yet, but promised it would arrive before Christmas.

Besides containers, Parallels is also close to fulfilling an earlier promise to bring support for OpenStack to its wares. The company says its service provider customers are keen for it to do so, and so it’s planning to provide the necessary automation layers they need to ensure OpenStack behaves well in an IaaS role.

To do so Parallels is teaming up with Mirantis, and the two companies will work on the latter’s OpenStack distribution to make it ready for service providers.

Finally, Parallels also spoke of a third collaboration – this one with WordPress. It recently launched version 12 of its Plesk web management tool, which includes new features able to patch multiple WordPress instances, plus any add-ins they run, simultaneously. That’s good news for WordPress hosts because the blogging platform currently has very few automation tools available for it.

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